Can You Lose Weight with Intuitive Eating?
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You may have heard of the concept of intuitive eating, but you feel confused about what it is. Maybe you're trying to put it into practice, but aren’t sure if what you're doing is in fact “intuitive eating.” It makes perfect sense if you’re confused!
As intuitive eating has grown in popularity, it is mentioned without adequate context, and you end up with exposure to many different people’s interpretation of intuitive eating. Right now intuitive eating is thrown around frequently in wellness culture spaces, and this can be problematic when individuals perpetuate intuitive eating without a true understanding of what it is. In particular, there are a lot of misconceptions about intuitive eating’s impact on weight. If you’ve been hoping for some clarity on intuitive eating and weight gain or loss, hopefully this will set the record straight.
What is Intuitive Eating?
Intuitive eating is an anti-diet, evidence-based approach to nutrition developed by clinicians Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch that has over 125 studies to validate its many benefits.
There are 10 intuitive eating principles that make up the framework:
Reject the Diet Mentality
Honor Your Hunger
Make Peace with Food
Challenge the Food Police
Discover the Satisfaction Factor
Feel Your Fullness
Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness
Respect Your Body, Movement- Feel the Difference
Honor Your Health with Gentle Nutrition
The intention of intuitive eating is to normalize eating and cultivate a peaceful relationship with food. It encourages tapping into the body’s signals by eating to honor hunger and cravings, and finish when satisfied. Intuitive eating is often a combination of structure and spontaneity.
Consistent meals and snacks help ensure people are eating enough to satisfy their hunger and energy needs, while there is freedom to enjoy food and experiment with patterns that will work best in their lives. With intuitive eating, food is an enjoyable part of life and can enhance your life, but it does not consume your life the way many diets and diets branded as lifestyles do. Typically people work through and explore the principles as needed to heal their relationships with food and build more trust in their body.
Intuitive Eating is Anti-Diet (not anti-person who diets)
As mentioned above, intuitive eating is an anti-diet approach to eating. The first principle of intuitive eating is “reject the diet mentality,” which involves becoming curious and more critical about the ways that diet culture shows up in your life.
But what do we mean when we say diet culture?
Diet culture can be thought of as the external pressures that negatively affect people’s food and body image. Dietitian and anti-diet advocate Christy Harrison defines diet culture as a system of beliefs that:
Worships thinness, equates thinness to health (and a person’s morality), and valorizes a thin ideal that is impossible to live up to
Promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status, despite the limited research to support the long-term sustainability of weight loss
Shames some ways of eating, while celebrating others, contributing to a pressure to eat a particular way (restrict portions, eat healthy, monitor calories/points/etc) and guilt if you don’t conform or your body can’t sustain the rigidity
Is oppressive to people who don’t fit what society considers “healthy,” which is typically people who are marginalized in society and don’t have the privilege to access the ideal of health
So, in many ways diet culture is culture and for nearly everyone, the norms they have learned about food and their bodies have been taught directly from diet culture. That is why healing your relationship with food can feel like an uphill battle. You are challenging a whole system of beliefs about food, weight, and exercise, while deciphering what you have taken in from diet culture.
It requires rewiring your brain with new pathways to reinforce what beliefs are authentic to you. In intuitive eating, “reject the diet mentality” is equally about rejecting diet culture. These are big, complicated topics that may not “click” right away. However, having the awareness of diet culture is a powerful first step. It may allow you to better decipher your own values and preferences versus the ones diet culture promotes in the early stages of intuitive eating.
Further, intuitive eating is often applied with a Health At Every Size philosophy. This is because it is an approach where you can learn to eat to nourish yourself as opposed to controlling your body or trying to eat your way to perfect health like many diets and “lifestyle” plans encourage. Some newer diets (aka Noom) have claimed that they “use intuitive eating” as part of their programs. This is incorrect as the pursuit of weight loss is antithetical to Intuitive Eating’s purpose.
What’s the "‘The Hunger and Fullness Diet’?
Despite its anti-diet purpose, intuitive eating has been co-opted by diet culture at times for weight loss. Or, sometimes people believe they can use it to lose weight. The logic goes a little something like this: “‘I must be eating too much or I can’t control myself around food, so if I only eat when I’m hungry and stop when I’m full, I will lose weight.” This is what many other anti-diet advocates call the “Hunger and Fullness diet.”
This can lead people astray because…
The intention is weight loss, which prevents them from finding freedom with food. There is a voice in their head that is policing the amount they’re eating and it comes with a bias of hoping to fill up on less food. In true intuitive eating fashion, hunger and fullness signals guide the food choices, but eating more food to satisfy hunger or eating before hunger strikes aren’t seen negatively. The intention is to honor the body’s energy needs without judgement or ulterior motive.
Hunger and fullness signals can be subtle. It may take some experimentation to understand how those signals show up. Eating when not obviously hungry might provide insight that the body did in fact need fuel. Or, eating past fullness can test the boundaries to distinguish between what makes a meal satisfying to sustain a person for a few hours, versus what makes a person feel uncomfortably full.
“If I’m allowed to eat anything I want, I will gain weight.”
A common fear people have with intuitive eating is weight gain. They fear that permission to eat what their body wants, as opposed to controlling their food intake, will mean that they will never stop eating. This is valid because everything you’ve been told in diet culture leads you to think that you cannot trust your body. It perpetuates the myth that glorifies being “disciplined” and having “willpower” for the sake of having a body that the world deems acceptable.
If a person who has been restricting and depriving their body of nutrients to function at its best starts to eat intuitively, they might gain weight because it is what their body needs. Time will tell. As for the food, it seems counterintuitive but the unconditional permission to eat actually helps people to feel less chaotic around food over time. With time and trust, the body will learn that their favorite foods are available anytime, so the enticing forbiddenness tends to wear off.
Why it’s OK if you hope that Intuitive Eating will lead to weight Loss
Considering that you exist in diet culture, a world where smaller bodies, pursuing weight loss, and eating the “right way” are celebrated, it is no wonder that you hope intuitive eating will lead to weight loss. Diet culture offers some people privileges while excluding others and so it is natural to want the validation society provides when you have the look or behaviors to fit the diet culture mold. Unfortunately, so many companies exploit that human desire of wanting acceptance by marketing diets and lifestyle plans as the next best thing and as a way for you to gain all the impossible attributes that diet culture celebrates. The pressure to conform to diet culture is especially powerful if you are in a body that experiences marginalization and oppression. For people in marginalized bodies, pursuing weight loss may be a means of survival.
All that to say, there are very valid reasons that you hope that intuitive eating will lead to weight loss. You can still hold space for that desire in spite of wanting to do things differently.
What You Will Gain With Intuitive Eating and What You Will Lose
So when you truly embrace intuitive eating, there are three possible outcomes. You might gain weight. You might lose weight. Or your weight might stay the same. Your weight might change as a result of healing your relationship with food, but the distinction is that weight loss or manipulating body shape is never the purpose of intuitive eating.
It’s not the sexy answer and it’s probably not the answer you want to hear. Our society values thinness in terms of beauty ideas and wrongfully equates thinness with health. It is perfectly normal and valid to want to lose weight in this culture.
At the same time you might be finding that following a diet or lifestyle is not working for you anymore. This is a difficult gray area to be, and yet it is totally okay. Again, intuitive eating is never meant to alienate people who want to lose weight (it is anti-diet culture, not anti-people who are affected by diet culture), but rather offer a new way to relate to food. For many people, being “on the fence” happens for a while as they figure out their next move. Prioritizing your relationship with food is a process. Nothing happens overnight. It is also possible to make peace with food before making peace with your body. There is no black and white or “right way,” so know that you have the freedom to start trying to eat intuitively even if you still desire a smaller body.
While the outcome of your weight cannot be predicted, it is highly likely that with intuitive eating you will LOSE:
Obsessing over food
Rigid mindsets toward food and food rules
The trap of the restrict binge cycle
The idea of “bad foods” or “cheat days”
And, it is highly likely that with intuitive eating you will GAIN:
Increased connection to your body’s signals
Flexibility and more freedom with food
Pleasure and the freedom to enjoy favorite foods without guilt
Being more present with loved ones at events centered around food
Weight loss and intuitive eating is a complex topic, and the opposition of the two are understandably really challenging to reconcile. Everyone, including you, has a different and unique food and body story. The gray area is a great place to be, and even opening yourself up to these ideas demonstrates courage.
References
Tribole E, Resch E. Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach. 4th ed. St. Martin’s Publishing Group; 2020.
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